What do you do when you have a blank sheet of paper, an idea?

Where do you start with a watercolor?

I'm going to show you a few different ways, but I'm going to focus on one painting.

That's this one here of this folding chair.

I'll show you the first steps, kind of how I revised my plan, and then I'll show you a technique that I used at the end that I haven't shared before in any of my videos.

Rokeby is a family-owned mansion in the Hudson Valley.

We were the guests of Louis Monroe, an artist, and he likes to paint folding chairs, among other things, and I do too, so we set one up in the sunshine.

I'm using watercolor pencil to block in the big shapes and the perspective.

And I'm going to use some watercolor and gouache.

The colors of watercolor are Raw Sienna, Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Red, Transparent Red Oxide, Alizarin Crimson, and Anthroquinone Blue.

Now, the first step for a lot of paintings that I do is to paint the local color, that is the surface color, of the objects first.

Fairly light value.

This gets rid of the white, but it gives you a chance to start to see the colors the painting will be in.

Now, to mix some blue and a little red into that yellow-orange.

This gives me a transparent, but quite varied, gray color to use for the lit area of the stones.

Now, of course, that chair I know has some very bright white reflections.

If I was painting the whole picture in transparent watercolor, I would have to be careful to paint around those light accents.

But because I've started a little bit more loosely, I can always rely on the white gouache to clean up the edges and to provide the highlights.

I'm mixing a dark with the blue and the brown.

It's okay if they melt into each other.

I'm using a fairly large flat brush, about 3 quarters of an inch.

It's a synthetic flat.

And let's speed it up here and I can show you how I can add a little bit more chroma or saturation to the orange.

And then start to indicate the chair legs.

But at this stage, I need that dark background tone in order to be able to read that webbing, that backlit webbing as having a luminous color of being lit from behind.

Now, I need to show the darker areas where the webbing overlaps in two layers.

I'm using a flat brush that will paint a square quite easily.

And then I can paint the spaces between the webbing.

Now, I'm starting to use some of the opaque titanium white.

And I'm painting the edges of the webbing.

By painting the white second, I can get crisp white highlights and sharp edges along the top and bottom of that chair arm.

I'm painting the edge of the paving stones in light where they meet the shadow.

Using not pure white obviously but white with warm colors mixed in.

That area that dripped down, I can cover up.

But here I've got to be quick in my touches.

If I scrub this too much, I'll lift up those chair legs because I can come back and paint them later.

I don't mind mixing opaque and transparent touches.

To me, there's no such thing as a pure watercolor.

As much as I love a transparent watercolor, there are textures that you can get with a mixture of transparent and opaque touches that you can't get any other way.

Now, here I'm laying down a stroke and I'm lightly rubbing it while it's wet to get that rough edge.

I try to keep in mind the perspective of the gaps in the stones.

I'm painting the edges of the paving stones in light.

I'll speed it up here so you can see the overall approach to the stonework, the cast shadows.

This part of the painting can stretch out for an hour or two.

The whole thing is going to take about two hours.

The fun part is coming in with a brush and here painting the reflected light on the shadow side of the chrome leg.

Here's the chair.

The light has moved quite a bit on the subject.

I can sometimes go back to large brushes, try to sweep up an area that's full of indecision and make one big stroke to state it simply.

Often I start with big brushes and end with small ones, but sometimes I end with big brushes too.

It's a great feeling to be painting with artist friends in this Indian summer weather.

Sometimes minutes or hours can go by without a word spoken or shared while we stay in our deep concentration.

I want to soften that edge in the upper left.

I think how can I do that?

I've got that sharp edge and I want to use a spray bottle.

I spray it on a paper towel and now I also want to spray the painting itself.

This will soften up the paint and activate it.

It's in a very vulnerable state now because I've sprayed it with water.

With a damp towel on the damp painting, a little bit of rubbing will lighten up and remove the paint layers.

This will let me blend that edge so that there's no hard edge anymore.

I can do the same thing in that foreground cast shadow, which seemed a little dark.

I wet it with a spray bottle, dab it with a paper towel, and that lightens it, gives a little more air in the shadow.

So for this painting I started with local color, then the big dark areas, then I came in with opaques when I needed clarification and highlights.

There are lots of other ways to start a watercolor and I've got links in the description of other videos that have other ways of beginning the painting.

Thanks for watching.

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